The ASA awards are conferred on sociologists for outstanding publications and achievements in the scholarship, teaching, and the practice of sociology. Award recipients are selected by committees appointed by the ASA Committee on Committees and the ASA Council.

All scholars will be recognized at the 2017 Annual Meeting Awards Ceremony on Sunday, August 13, at 4:30 p.m. in Montreal. The Awards Ceremony will immediately precede the formal address of the ASA President Michèle Lamont. All registrants are invited to attend an Honorary Reception immediately following the address to congratulate President Lamont and the award recipients.

What has caused the surge in top-end income inequality? Is it a product of changes in the economy? Or, as Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics contend, have the key shifts been in America’s politics and policies?

“How does one put into words the rage that workers feel when supervisors threaten to replace them with workers who will not go to the bathroom in the course of a fourteen-hour day of hard labor, even if it means wetting themselves on the line?”—From the Preface

In this gutsy, eye-opening examination of the lives of workers in the New South, Vanesa Ribas, working alongside mostly Latino/a and native-born African American laborers for sixteen months, takes us inside the contemporary American slaughterhouse. Ribas, a native Spanish speaker, occupies an insider/outsider status there, enabling her to capture vividly the oppressive exploitation experienced by her fellow workers. She showcases the particular vulnerabilities faced by immigrant workers—a constant looming threat of deportation, reluctance to seek medical attention, and family separation—as she also illuminates how workers find connection and moments of pleasure during their grueling shifts. Bringing to the fore the words, ideas, and struggles of the workers themselves, On The Line underlines how deep racial tensions permeate the factory, as an overwhelmingly minority workforce is subject to white dominance. Compulsively readable, this extraordinary ethnography makes a powerful case for greater labor protection, especially for our nation’s most vulnerable workers.

The ASA Political Sociology Section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (Book) Award Committee has announced that Professor David FitzGerald’s book, Culling the Masses is a co-winner with National Colors of this year’s award. Congratulations!

Natalie Aviles’ paper, “The Little Death: Rigoni-Stern and the Problem of Sex and Cancer in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Research,” has been awarded the 2015 Hacker-Mullins Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology. This paper has been pubished in the journal Social Studies of Science.